Biography
Philipp Rode is Executive Director of LSE Cities and Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is co-director of the LSE Executive MSc in Cities and co-convenes the LSE Sociology Course on ‘City Making: The Politics of Urban Form’. As researcher, consultant and advisor he has been directing interdisciplinary projects comprising urban governance, transport, city planning and urban design at the LSE since 2003. The focus of his current work is on institutional structures and governance capacities of cities as part of an international collaboration with UN Habitat/Habitat III and on city-level green economy strategies which includes co-directing the LSE Cities research for the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. He has previously led the coordination of the chapters on Green Cities and Green Buildings for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Green Economy Report. Rode is Executive Director of the Urban Age Programme and since 2005 organised Urban Age conferences in partnership with Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft in over a dozen world cities bringing together political leaders, city mayors, urban practitioners, private sector representatives and academic experts. He manages the Urban Age research efforts and recently co-authored ‘Towards New Urban Mobility: The case of London and Berlin’ (2015), ‘Cities and Energy: Urban morphology and heat energy demand’ (2014), ‘Going Green: How cities are leading the green economy’ (2012), and ‘Transforming Urban Economies’ (2013).

Title
Cities and the new climate economy: The role of urban form and transport

Focus
This lecture is based on research for the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

Issues which the lecture addresses
It presents the findings of the cities research programme of the Commission’s New Climate Economy (NCE) project which LSE Cities is co-leading. The overall aim of NCE is to provide independent and authoritative evidence on the relationship between actions which can strengthen economic performance and those which reduce the risk of dangerous climate change.

Short analysis of the above issues
It has been repeatedly argued that cities have a unique opportunity to build a different model of economic growth – one which achieves the benefits of growth but with significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions alongside co-benefits such as improved health. And it is commonly understood that this will require a focus on actions that are systematically important for how cities function including decisions around urban form, city design and transport.

Propositions for addressing the issue
This lecture will feature some of the core findings and arguments that were recently published in the first NCE publication ‘Better growth, better climate’ and position the role of cities as part of a global green economy transition.